We Can’t Decide If This “Scissors Method” for Eating Pasta Is Brilliant or Just Plain Wrong

updated Feb 24, 2020

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Everyone has a strategy for eating noodles. In Italy, adults use a fork to twirl pasta against the plate to create a nicely twisted bite, while children sometimes twirl it against a spoon. In Japan, ramen-noodle eaters are encouraged to slurp the noodles, which both solves the problem of getting long noodles into your mouth and cools the hot-from-soup temperature down to prevent burning. And then there is this guy.

Last Friday, this video of a man, sitting alone, wearing a hunting bib, while eating pasta went viral on Twitter. With a fork in one hand, and scissors in the other hand, he stabs his plate of pasta, picks up his fork, and then cuts the pasta with scissors in order to get the perfect bite.

“Wtf,” asked the original poster, along with a skull emoji, two crying ones, and a pair of scissors emoji. The video has over eight million views (!), and over 2,000 comments. Most of the comments, surprisingly, say that this method makes a lot of sense. Although other people were concerned by the speed at which he is eating — “Slow down. You are giving ME heartburn,” writes one commenter.

This man is clearly not new to this method. In fact, he looks like he has it down to an art form. The speed at which he uses his scissors, although slightly disturbing, is also impressive. My only concern is the noodle scraps that would be left at the end of this cutting method — wouldn’t the leftovers be hard to eat? How do you pick up those inch-long noodles? Is this brilliant, or just plain messy? I can’t decide.

Despite Twitter’s reaction to this, it should be noted that the video’s scissors-as-eating utensil idea is hardly a new invention. If you’ve ever sat down to the Korean cold noodle dish naengmyeon (which you should do on the first hot day of the year, if you haven’t), you’ll almost always be handed a pair of scissors. The chewy noodles, usually made from buckwheat, are tough to cut into with your teeth, so pre-cutting them saves tons of difficulty. So, maybe this bib-clad man got his idea from eating naengmyeon!